5 Steps to Create a Stunning Product Management Roadmap

Product development starts with generating a roadmap. This roadmap is a powerful lever in the professional hands of the manager. It enables to plan, communicate and visualize the future for the product.

A well-defined roadmap combines a product team, key stakeholders, and customers on the product strategy and priorities. Actually, building and managing a detailed roadmap is one of the most essential elements of a product manager’s role.

Product management roadmaps are aimed to reduce uncertainty about the product future and demonstrate everyone where to focus on.

The typical product management roadmap includes the following elements:

• Product strategy
• Key goals
• What features will be built
• When those features will be implemented
• Who is responsible for building particular features
• High-level priorities

How frequently should the roadmap be updated?

If your team deliver frequently, you will have constant feedback from the users about your product and the specific features you are delivering.

It means that your product management roadmap will have changes because when the users try a new feature, they will probably make some suggestions.

Luckily, continuous delivery provides enough flexibility. Your roadmap should frequently change, according to what your team will learn with your users and with the way, the market reacts to your efforts. Every change of the course should update your roadmap and communicate it to everyone in the team.

How to create a product management roadmap?

1. Define a strategy

The way you ground and prove your product is your strategy. Stakeholders must be aware of what business goals your product will achieve. Defining the strategy, you should be able to answer some essential questions, such as:

• What customers will use the product?
• What problems will the product solve?

A product strategy also includes major product differentiators that make it stand out from similar products existed on the market.

2. Gather requirements

Interview the customer support team and sales. They definitely know the outside world of customers and have their feedback that can help you prioritize new features.

One more effective way is to engage directly with the product user community. The product enthusiasts and experts who already used your product will provide you with valuable details.

Finally, you have deep knowledge about the product’s functionality and its limitations. Analyze the features and think about what components are most vital to your customers.

3. Set broad timeframes to your initiatives

When you avoid hard deadlines, you are not committing your team members to promises that you might not be able to deliver.

Remember that the key mission of your product roadmap is providing guidance. Rather than assigning specific dates, sometimes product managers choose to set initiatives at the monthly or quarterly level.

4. Adapt the roadmap to all stakeholders

In order to get the total success, you should gain full support during development, aim to get stakeholder buy-in early on. Customize the roadmap and present it tailored to their particular stakeholders’ interests.

Company executives often want to see all the elements outlined in your product strategy as well as data regarding the market size. Your colleagues from the marketing department will like to get product features and understand how the product will compare to similar ones. Developers will want to get all requirements, deadlines, sprints, and specific tasks. Sales guys will require release dates, key product benefits, and advantages for customers, and so on.

5. Share the roadmap

Besides encouraging team engagement and gaining top management support, sharing roadmaps gives the opportunity to communicate all the progress you have made and set expectations.

Sharing the roadmap is the essential stage that ensures accountability among your team, and keeps everyone up to date.

Fortunately, modern product management software allows the sharing option and product managers are able to communicate roadmaps any time.

Online product management tools for creating a product roadmap

You may definitely create a quick physical product roadmap that will outline your product goals and strategy. However, there are several great online solutions designed to ease and improve this process.

Online product management tools save your time and increase productivity by providing shareable documents for collaboration and making it easier to track history and versioning. Many of them allow using pre-built templates.

Here are some of the popular roadmapping software:

• Hygger — allows planning your product goals, strategy, releases, and features with the help of smart roadmaps. You may choose handy templates to save your time and rate product features or tasks using ICE, RICE or Weighted Scoring.
• Aha — provides helpful modules for managing a product through its entire lifecycle.
• ProductPlan empowers product managers with several roadmaps in a master plan. Their roadmaps include drag and drop features. With their help, you can quickly plan and show the strategy to get alignment across the entire company.
• Craft — proposes to build sustainable product management roadmaps and apply powerful templates. The visual timelines provided by Craft are really good for streamlining your flow.
• Smartsheet — offers powerful collaboration functionality, with a simple user interface. You’ll get easy-to-use Gantt charts with various views and customization features such as color and symbols.

There are companies that keep their roadmaps as big secrets, while some teams decide to publish a high-level view of their roadmap to get clients excited about upcoming features.

Online roadmap software makes keeping abreast of changes easy. Make your life easier and choose the best roadmap tool for building stunning product management roadmaps.